The Free and Open Source Life

How to write an OpenStack book... in 5 days!

It was announced several weeks ago: a group of passionate OpenStackers would gather, starting Feb 25th, for a Sprint Book to come up with the highly expected Operations Guide.

Certainly the Book Sprint methodology is pretty interesting: a group of people get together to write a book in a week or less with the guide of a facilitator. The idea is that, on day one, you start with nothing and, by the end of the last day, you end up with a published book. And I said "interesting"...? Scary!

Despite not being part of the fellowship, I couldn't help feeling anxious for them. It was a bit of a daunting quest: OpenStack is big and has the complexity of every new technology. There is a lot to read and to ask, and to test and break before you can tell you know enough to try to explain it to somebody else, but the team was skilled, experienced and fully armed with sticky notes and markers. Still, five days seemed literally crazy to put together all the info, explain the basics about cloud computing and its requirements, go from innocent commands to the troubleshooting depths of a cloud without grieving for all those fallen lines that could not be kept for the sake of edition and... Okay, I might be going overboard, but I've heard it was an intense week, to say the least.

These are our daring participants:

Diane Fleming--OpenStack Docs writer

Tom Fifield --OpenStack Docs contributor, Australia

Anne Gentle --OpenStack Docs Coordinator and writer (I'm honored to have her as my OPW mentor)

Lorin Hochstein --Cloud expert

Adam Hyde--FLOSS Manuals founder and Book Sprint facilitator

Jonathan Proulx--OpenStack Admin at MIT

Everett Toews--Developer Advocate at Rackspace

Joe Topjian--Cloud Admin and designer, Canada

Still doubtful? They totally made it, and the feedback is terrific! (they even used an open source tool as the editing & publishing platform!)

I'm happy they nailed it, but most of all, I feel grateful. Not just because of the great effort they've gone through or because there is now more quality documentation to relay on, but also because they've created this to and for the community: it's not a static doc, it's planned to grow and be improved, an asset we can all contribute to.*

There are several remarkable things about the work itself. I personally enjoyed (as many others will, I guess) the Use Cases and Tales from the Cryp^H^H^H^H Cloud chapters --it's easy to feel lonely in a server room when it's all about getting things up and running, and those sections not only help you remember you're not alone and others have been through the same, but also show what's behind FOSS technology: hard-working, committed people. Something this achievement demonstrates quite well. Congratulations!

*You can also purchase a paper copy here, all the proceeds will go to the OpenStack Foundation :)